Michael Silverstein
University of Chicago

It should be clear to anyone who surveys the historical record that the “discovery” of the phoneme – that is, the codification of phonological theory and method – was key in linguists’ consciousness of a new disciplinary era, one that retrospectively ascribed a conceptual revolution to the sainted figure of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). The analysis of every plane of language, from word morphology to phrasal, clausal, and sentential syntax (and for some hardy structuralist souls, to stretches of discourse beyond) has been calqued from linguists’ experience of working with the phonological plane. The ironies of all this are supreme in relation to the available text of the 1916 Cours de linguistique générale, where “Saussure” – as reconstituted d’outre tombe by Bally and Sechehaye – has nothing of interest to say about synchronic sound systems as such, but really concentrates on the analysis of lexical and grammatical symbols.¹

But the ironies do not cease there. The live and youthful Saussure of all of about 19 years of age had, in fact, glimpsed what morphological and morphophonological structure in the modern sense was all about in his Mémoire (1879) on the Proto-Indo-European vowel system. Working backwards from attested forms in the various branches he demonstrated that the logic of the phonological combinatorics of word-roots in their various derivations and inflections pointed unerringly to the prior existence of now-lost phonemic segments that left their traces in at first seemingly irregular vowel correspondences in the daughter dialects, at once made regular by the presumption of these “coefficients sonantiques” (later identified as “laryngeals”) that were absorbed by adjacent vowels, “coloring” them.² Amazingly, despite the indirect confirmation by Jerzy Kuryƚowicz in his famous 1927 paper on Hittite ḫ (which occurs, for the most part, in several of the predicted syntagmatic positions), and despite the typological parallelisms in American Native languages such as Tonkawa, Nootka, and certain Salishan languages, “Laryngeal Theory” was still highly controversial among Indo-Europeanists down to my undergraduate days in the 1960s!

The point is, in a diachronic framework, Saussure’s brilliant youthful insight at once implicitly created, through a kind of convergent internal reconstruction, a model of the (morpho)phonological structure of the ancestral language at the same time he explicitly did what any Leipzig Neogrammarian – among whom he was at that very moment matriculated – would aspire to do: to render otherwise “irregular” correspondences “regular.” The first is the pre-condition for the second: some kind of abstract structural unit in syllabically framed distributions turned out to be the hero of “sound” change. Neogrammarianism and diachrony thus form the real framework we must consider to understand both the roots of synchronic structuralism and the profound continuities notwithstanding the reorientation of the disciplinary focus in method, in models, and (as my old teacher Van Quine used to say) in “ontic commitments” about language.

The story to be told here, thus far to my mind not clearly enough articulated, is the gradual emergence and Kuhnian “normalizing” of the mode of inductive study of the Indo-European languages individually and as members of a language family sparked by, and institutionally increasingly focused upon the facticity of autonomous phonological change, a.k.a. Lautgesetz ‘sound law’ (see Jankowsky 1972; Wilbur 1977; Morpurgo Davies 1994). Lautgesetze had both an epistemological and an ontological manifestation, not carefully enough distinguished either in the instance or in the later historiographic accounts of the late 19^th century. To be sure, the continued disciplinary focus on the plane of phonology served as the work-space in which the transition without a rupture of discipline was effected between the comparative-historical linguistics of etymological forms-over-time and the descriptive-structural linguistics of system-internal relations-of-forms.

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